The Denial of the Historicity of Jesus in Past and Present

Die Leugnung der Geschichtlichkeit Jesu in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (English: The Denial of the Historicity of Jesus in Past and Present) was a 1926 book in German by Arthur Drews on Christ myth theory.

[1] Drews gives the most prominent place to David Strauss, who reduced all the supernatural events of the New Testament stories to the role of myths; and to Bruno Bauer, the first professional scholar who denied the historicity of Jesus, argued the priority of Mark as inventor of the Gospel story and the fiction of Jesus's existence, rejected all of Paul's epistles as non genuine, and emphasized the input of Greco-Roman ideas (especially the Stoicism of Seneca) in the New Testament documents.

Among those Jesus deniers, Arthur Drews was especially influenced by the following thinkers: Space is dedicated to the major advocates of the School of (Comparative) History of Religions,[3] flourishing in Germany (Die Religionsgeschichtliche Schule) and the United Kingdom.

German orientalist Peter Jensen, an expert on Semitic Languages and Babylonian literature, in Das Gilgamesch-Epos in der Weltliteratur, (Part I, 1906 & Part II, 1928) [The Epic of Gilgamesh in World Literature],[4] had analyzed the Epic of Gilgamesh, and found parallels in all later ANE myths, including the Hebrew Tanakh, Moses and Isaiah,[5] thus impacting on the authenticity of the Christian Gospels and destroyed the unique character of the Jesus story.

The consequences are generally underestimated.It is quite understandable that the denial party is unique only in that point [of the non-historicity, Ahistorizität], and otherwise offers a variety of diverging explanations [each denier has his own independent hypothesis].